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UW Men's Soccer Squad Posts NCAA First-Round Win in 4th Overtime

SEATTLE - Junior defender Bryn Ritchie scored during the fourth and final overtime late Friday night, lifting the 13th-ranked Washington men's soccer team to a 1-0 victory over No. 14 Alabama-Birmingham in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at Husky Soccer Field.

Pacific-10 Conference champion Washington (14-5) advances to the second round and will meet the winner of Saturday's first-round game between Indiana and San Jose State. The Huskies are making their sixth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance and UAB (14-5-2) participated in the postseason for the second straight season. The Blazers advanced to the Elite Eight last season while UW was a second-round loser in 1999.

Ritchie scored in the 142nd minute, just eight minutes before play would have ceased and the game would have been decided by a penalty-kick tiebreaker. Mark Hogenhout set up the goal with a corner kick from the right side. Ritchie ran on to the corner kick at the near post and headed the ball just inside the right side of the goal at 141:57 for his sixth score of the season.

'Mark put a corner on my head earlier in the game and I felt like I should have done better with it,' Ritchie explained. 'We talked during one of the breaks and felt confident that the next one we had we'd be able to stick it in. The last two or three corners that we had, I felt like they were paying less attention to me and Mark just played a perfect ball and I had a little bit of space in there and got a goal.'

Sophomore goalkeeper Chad Olsen saved six shots en route to his sixth shutout for the Huskies.

'Sometimes these first round games can be the most difficult in the whole run,' Washington coach Dean Wurzberger said. 'You get by that first one and you can move on. It's a big step for us to get by this one because the 0-0 could have gone either way.'

The game was played in front of 1,231 spectators who braved the sub-freezing temperatures. The temperature was in the mid-30s at the start of the game, but it dropped well below 30 by the end of the three-hour, 18-minute game.

'I think it affected how both teams played. It made it harder for both teams to play the way they liked to,' said UAB coach Mike Getman. 'Once we got started, though, it started to heat up and it just became a matter of two good teams playing well. This was two very good teams playing a very good soccer game.'